Nives

by Sacha Naspini

  “Oh mother.”

  “I don’t know what she saw. She was drowsy with sleep. ‘You’ve gotten dressed,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. I had my rain jacket on. Worse, the suitcase was two feet away. ‘I was going to get a breath of air,’ I said. I used to do it quite often, especially after a bad bout of drinking—one of those times when you don’t pass out completely, but you lie in bed as if you are riding waves, the whole room transformed into a malicious carnival ride. Fernet has that effect on me, for example. Sometimes I woke up in the car, feeling as though I’d landed on another planet. ‘Maybe the lasagna we had for dinner was a bit off,’ Donatella said. Only then did I notice that she was deadly pale, a hand cradling her stomach. ‘I feel like a brick is sitting right here.’ A moment later her eyes opened wide, and she ran into the bathroom. What else could I do? I followed her. She’d even lost a little on her crazy run to the bathroom. I found her with her head down the toilet. A sign that her late period couldn’t be ignored. In any case, I’d been found out.”

  “In the meantime, someone was dying of cold out on the curve of the road.”

  “It went on all night. Instead of taking on the world in my Fiat 127, I was washing vomit off the tiles. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, whatever you say. A picture of you in mind, on the side of the road, waiting. By the time Donatella had gotten back to sleep, it was past two in the morning. I found myself nailed to the mattress, whereas, in another scenario, we had long passed Livorno already. I woke up still fully dressed and leaped to my feet immediately. My wife had already gotten up. I heard the usual bustling noises coming from the kitchen. She was already dressed. “What a night!” she said. She looked better, but she did everything to avoid my gaze: there was a cup to wash, barley coffee to serve, and so on. Finally, she realized she was late for work and deigned to look at me. ‘Will I see you here for lunch?’ She always asked me that, because if I had to treat animals in some of the farms in the area, I often preferred having a quick sandwich out. That day, however, her question was like an elephant smashing into the living room. I nodded, and she left. Even the way she slammed the door sounded different from usual. That was when I saw it. The suitcase was still there. Exhausted by everything that had happened in the night, I’d fallen asleep without putting my things away.”

  They both hung from those last words. Especially Nives, who suddenly felt as if they had cemented her mouth. Loriano was the first to break the silence. “Crocetta saw me come back with the same bundle of notes he’d given me the day before. This time, he didn’t say a word. He put the money back into the safe, charged me the commission, and so long.”

  Reliving these events had emptied both of them out; the late hour was also beginning to take its toll. On one end, there was Loriano, who had received a pummeling and gone over so many episodes from his past that he felt full of holes; on the other end, there was Nives, who had suddenly been robbed of the rage that had been feeding her for half a lifetime, like a hearth hiding embers beneath the ashes. She felt a certain tenderness for Loriano now. In fact, she was surprised when those feelings she’d buried long ago broke over her like a wave. It’s odd how an old flame can be rekindled at a certain age. She cleared her throat. In a tone that could have been that of a scared deer, she said, “Why didn’t we seek one another out later, then?”

  Bottai looked at himself in the mirror. Which, if it had been required to reflect the vet’s sentiments entirely, would have shattered to pieces. “I don’t know . . . I was ashamed, I suppose.”

  “I was really angry, you know.”

  “You vanished from the face of the earth; that much I remember.”

  “An avalanche like that would have buried anyone. Weeks went by before I found the courage to go back into town. I made up a thousand excuses not to go to Thursday market.”

  “Not like anyone would have shot you.”

  “If that had been the problem, I would have camped in the middle of Piazza San Bastiano. I would have gone in front of a firing squad. But just the idea of seeing you again made me feel like I was dying. When it finally happened, you’d bought yourself a flashy car.”

  “Two idiots.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I was lost in a vale of shame. You were as angry as the devil himself.”

  “Worse.”

  “And we lost one another.”

  “Worse.”

  “We threw each other away.”

  “Then Anteo told me one morning that he’d called you.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was that little donkey that suddenly started behaving as if it were possessed, rasping and foaming at the mouth, rolling on the ground. When he started kicking himself in the belly it was too much. It was heart-wrenching to watch. Sheriff. That’s what he was called. Because he used to defend us from trespassers. Every time someone he didn’t know came along, he’d start braying with his front hooves up on the fence. He did Roy’s job. Our lovely Alsatian would wag his tail happily at anyone, even snakes. Bless him.”

  “I can see him now, that donkey. He was a trouble-maker, alright. He was suffering from colic. I would get cramps just thinking about being called out to Poggio Corbello for those emergencies.”

  “I stayed in the house the whole time. In fact, as soon as I heard the engine on the big road, I locked myself in my room. I sat there, knowing a certain Bottai was just a few yards away. Not knowing which way to turn, I took to praying. What an idiot I was.”

  “I nearly lost an eye trying to take care of that big baby. All of a sudden, I got a horseshoe in the face. I still have the scar. It’d never happened before and it never happened again. I can usually feel the animals, you know. Just to give you an idea where my head was that day. From one moment to the next, that ass kicked me back to reality.”

  “I could have strangled you! I heard you calling me from outside. ‘Nives! Nives!’ I wanted to die. By the time I got there, you were already in a pool of blood.”

  “I didn’t know what had happened. I walked around without knowing what I was doing. It was far worse than a hangover . . . Poor old Anteo was guiding me, and all the while there was the voice of a little Loriano inside me saying, ‘Don’t you dare say anything you’ll regret!’ I had no idea whether my ravings were audible on the outside. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in an armchair.”

  “Two towels.”

  “What?”

  “Two towels drenched in blood.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “Nothing. You were looking around, your eyes like an owl’s. Meanwhile, my poor husband was going out of his mind; he was already planning to get his rifle out and shoot the poor animal. He was worried about being sued or something. He was also worried we could get rabies.”

  “There was one moment that only I could have known about.”

  “Which was?”

  “In the middle of that colossal discombobulation—not even the slap Maciste gave me when I was twenty had the same effect, though I walked around for a week with no feeling on the right side of my face and a buzz in my ear that lasted a month or two—all of a sudden the chaos calmed, the curtain parted, and I saw you.”

  “A right sight.”

  “You had your hair tied up high, but two curls had freed themselves and had fallen over your face.”

  “I bet. I was wringing out cloths nineteen to the dozen. You had a gash across your forehead that wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

  “Everything was blurry, except your face. Anteo’s words sounded as though they were rising out of a well a hundred miles deep.”

  “Getting kicked in the head by a donkey will do that.”

  “That’s what you do to me.”

  “Come off it. Then the ambulance came.”

  “I can’t even remember.”

  “When they took you away, I nearly fainted. I ended up in
the armchair you’d been sitting in two minutes before. Now there’s a hen who’s taken a turn sitting there, embalmed with Tide.”

  “I came back to my senses the next day with two memories: a massive headache, and a picture of you, with two rebellious curls. They told me not to go to sleep, but that was all I wanted to do, so that I could dream of you on top of me. Donatella gave me a shake every time I stared into space. Tears dripped down my face for no reason.”

  “They said it was the head trauma.”

  “I spent a month like that, checking everything I did. It’s not that I wasn’t able to move; the doctor ordered me not to. Even when I turned my neck, I had to take precautions. I wanted to wing it over to Poggio Corbello in a second and say to you, ‘Quietly now. Let’s leave.’ With no bags this time, no money, nothing. We would have reinvented our lives in Palma de Mallorca, or in the desert surrounded by camels. I didn’t care a hoot about America. America was you.”

  Nives caught her breath. For a second, she stepped out of her skin and saw a film sequence: she and Loriano, who knows where; a whole life of what could have been but had never happened spinning by. A poisoned candy that she reluctantly put aside. Her hands itched. How stupid she’d been to give up so easily! It was true that the vet hadn’t exactly played easy to get . . . One October evening, after all that wild partying at the fall festival, the fate of two lovers had been sealed by an upset stomach. If only Donatella hadn’t been so greedy that night . . . all of a sudden, she felt sorry for her. To stay in a marriage even while knowing that one night her husband had been on the verge of letting her bleed out, abandoned. The ugliest kind of abandonment, with no explanation, like a thief. By contrast, Nives had kept her side of the bargain. Okay, her escape had fizzled out thirty yards from her front door, but that hadn’t been her fault. As far as she was concerned, she had one point over him in that department. The widow felt a wave of heat flow through her: in the light of the latest confessions, she was better able to understand the obstacles that had been put in the way of their elopement. She felt like a kid who’d just tripped over on the gravel and had to get herself up, with grit in her palms and grazes on her backside, without even a friend to beat up as payback. Nives realized she was doing something unheard of: she was forgiving him. It came naturally to her. She could see why: it was a new prison that she hadn’t gotten used to yet. In some ways it pacified her; at the same time, it ripped her to pieces. Without anger, she was nothing. “Maybe you were right,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat. “It would have been better not to talk about it.”

  This felt like the right moment for Bottai to make his surprise attack. “What do you need the letter for, then?”

  Nives had to make a karate move with her thoughts. She’d been on such a different wavelength that for a second she had no idea what Loriano was talking about. It was like being shaken out of a daydream. She didn’t like the situation she found herself in once she was back on earth one bit. She was on her own in the house at Poggio Corbello, her soul torn apart, and her legs aching from standing up and talking on the phone for so long. Nonetheless, one nerve in particular had been prodded, and she answered on an impulse, “Tell me, is that all you can think about?”

  Loriano bit his lip, cursing under his breath. He had prepared a juicy dish, and now he’d spilled it just as it was doing its magic. He tried to reclaim a little ground by saying, “It still seems offensive to me, considering what we once were.”

  Nives was already sharpening her fingernails, her eyes bulging like a devil’s. “Are you wooing me with memories? Do I look stupid to you?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Don’t pretend not to understand.”

  “If something happened, I didn’t notice.”

  “Bravo! All that talk about lasagna and vomit, bank withdrawals, hallucinations after a donkey kick, and so on. I’d almost fallen for it. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?”

  That was exactly what Bottai was doing at that moment. He looked away quickly. “Did I say anything wrong?”

  Just like that, she was the old Nives again, if not worse: rivers of resentment. She gripped the receiver as if it were a sword and barked down the phone. “You great big ugly snail! You pirate! You ball-breaking namby-pamby! You’re the worst kind of traitor!” A word came to her that seemed to sum up all her woes; she fired it up, forming a ball of flames to shoot from the mouth of a volcano, “Bastard!”

  The word reached Loriano like a firebomb which knocked his head off. He realized he was lost. “But Nives . . .” he spluttered.

  She was in the throes of an epic moment: she was crying. She hadn’t done so even at Anteo’s funeral. But now she was. Because, Holy God, she couldn’t go on any longer. With all those reminiscences he’d played her with, she felt abandoned once again at the side of the road. Bottai had really been an evil sorcerer. First, he’d taken her on a flight to paradise lost, encouraging her to open up her heart, which she’d protected for centuries. Then he’d stuck the knife in for his own self-serving reasons. That is, the matter of the letter. He was trying to make sure it didn’t get around too much. It was the worst slap in the face he could have meted out to her. Big fat tears dropped down her face in a waterfall. She’d been humiliated, especially by herself; she’d dug her grave with her own hands. Moreover, there was an undeniable fact: how could she hold it against Loriano, when all he wanted to do was protect what he’d built up over a lifetime? All that was left for her was solitude. Once her husband had died, she was left standing there in her slippers, naked, like the old women in children’s nursery rhymes, sleeping with a hen on her bedside table. She couldn’t breathe through her sobs. Every shudder felt like it was turning her stomach upside-down. In the end, though, disarmed, she managed to say it, the receiver dangling under her chin, “Alright then, I’ll throw it away.”

  Bottai was about to catch the ball on the rebound, but he felt a twinge somewhere inside. He saw himself as an executioner, and he didn’t like playing that part. The widow was making him out to be a rascal, one of those men who selfishly play with people’s feelings. In an imperious tone of voice, he said, “Let God strike me down if one word of what I’ve said isn’t true!”

  Nives was still weeping. Her tears continued to flow; she couldn’t control them. She was gasping for breath. The taste of snot on her lips. She somehow managed to say, “It doesn’t matter.”

  Loriano was in the right, but he refused to put on the costume required to finish the duel. It was true, he had dwelled on the past in order to soften her up a little. But being cast as a devil, who had harked back to an old love affair for his own convenience, was too much. There was no way he was going to sacrifice the sentiments of the past. “You’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick, as usual.”

  “At least you had a little fun.”

  Bottai was offended, despite himself. “Nives, come back to earth now.”

  “I’ve been back on earth since ’82.”

  “All I’m saying is that it would be crazy to drag other people down just to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.”

  “So, I’ve been alive all this time just to say yes to everything, to let events roll over me like a bulldozer while I stay as quiet as a mouse?”

  “All you need is a little common sense.”

  “I get dumped, I bring up a daughter with a father on loan, and now, on top of everything, I get an earful from you.”

  “I don’t need to convince you of anything. If you prefer to drop a bomb with your letter, feel free. I’m just telling you that there’s no need; your plan to settle scores would break many other people’s hearts. You wouldn’t even be there to watch the show.”

  By that point, Nives was playing with an open hand. She didn’t even hear what she was saying as she said it: “And yet, it’s the only way I can leave a mark.” She only realized afterwards that she’d laid herself completely b
are: her death would cause an earthquake in several families. The only card she had left would burn down what little she’d built.